Chương 5
The detective asked Caleb, “Anything else?”
“He said Dad always messed up stuff that needed patience.”
Owen flinched.
Caleb looked at him.
“Mom says that.”
Hannah closed her eyes.
The room went silent.
A familiar detail did not mean Marcus had been inside the old apartment.
It meant someone had told him.
The police spent the next two days testing possibilities that felt unbearable because they were ordinary.
Old social-media posts.
Family photographs.
Real-estate listing images from when the previous apartment had been sold.
Messages between Owen and Marcus during their work relationship.
A photograph found in an archived group text finally explained the green wall.
Years earlier, Owen had sent a picture of a damaged baseboard to a contractor group while discussing flooring repairs. Caleb’s old bedroom was visible in the background. Green paint. Plastic stars. A child’s red lamp.
Marcus had been in the group.
The line about Owen lacking patience appeared in another message from one of Owen’s former partners after an argument about scheduling.
Marcus had not possessed secret knowledge.
He had collected scraps.
The distinction comforted nobody.
Hannah changed every password she could think of.
Then she changed them again.
She called the building manager and demanded new locks.
She canceled grocery deliveries.
She removed the children’s names from a school fundraising page.
She deleted photographs from accounts she had not used in years.
At three in the morning on the second night, she woke in the hotel and found herself scrolling through eleven-year-old comments beneath a picture of Caleb as a baby.
People she no longer spoke to had written things like those cheeks and future heartbreaker and he has Owen’s eyes.
She deleted the entire album.
Then she sat on the bathroom floor and cried without making noise because both children were asleep in the next room.
Scout was awake.
He watched her from the doorway.
“Don’t,” Hannah whispered.
Scout walked in anyway.
He rested his chin on her knee.
She laughed once through her nose.
“You’re extremely bad with boundaries.”
His tail thumped against the doorframe.
The children refused to return home.
Hannah did not make them.
The hotel room turned into a temporary household.
Wet raincoats hung from chairs. Sophie’s pink boots sat near the heating vent. Caleb kept his sneakers on even while watching television. Hannah ordered toothbrushes, socks, phone chargers, and a hairbrush from a twenty-four-hour pharmacy delivery service because going to a store felt impossible.
Owen stayed in the room across the hall.
Not by Hannah’s choice.
The police had determined that the attack on him was probably connected to Marcus, although no second suspect had been identified. His stolen phone was recovered from a storm drain two blocks from the collision site. A traffic camera showed the rear-ending vehicle, but the plate had been obscured with mud.
Marcus had been in Seattle at the terminal when Owen was attacked.
Therefore he had not acted alone.
That fact changed everything again.
Marcus refused to identify the other person.
His attorney advised him not to answer questions.
The prosecutor warned the Reeds not to assume the second person remained dangerous.
Hannah heard only remained dangerous.
Owen heard the part about assumptions.
They fought over it in the hotel hallway on the third morning.
“You want to send them back to school?” Hannah asked.
“I said we should ask what the security plan would be.”
“That is not the same thing?”
“No.”
“They were almost taken three days ago.”
“I know when it happened.”
“Do you?”
Owen looked down the hall.
A housekeeping cart stood beside the elevator. A woman was folding white towels and pretending not to hear them.
“We can’t keep them in a hotel forever.”
“Watch me.”
“Hannah.”
“No, you don’t get to use that voice.”
“What voice?”
“The reasonable one. You don’t get to suddenly be the reasonable parent because I’m scared.”
“I’m scared too.”
“Then act like it.”
His face tightened.
“I drove around for an hour yesterday checking the same black SUV because I thought it was following me.”
Hannah’s anger paused.
Owen looked embarrassed as soon as he said it.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“It wasn’t. It belonged to a dentist from Tacoma.”
“How do you know?”
“He asked why I kept staring at him.”
Hannah almost smiled.
She hated that she almost smiled.
“You scared a dentist.”
“Apparently.”
“Good.”
“Why is that good?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood there with nothing settled.
The housekeeper pushed her cart into the service elevator.
The doors closed.
Hannah said, quieter, “I don’t know how to do this.”
Owen looked at her.
For once he did not offer a solution.
“Neither do I.”
That was the first useful thing he had said.
Daniel spent his administrative leave reorganizing the garage.
He did not plan to.
He opened a cabinet looking for electrical tape and discovered a box of rusted screws, two dead flashlight batteries, three leashes, a cracked bicycle reflector, and a receipt from 2019.
He sat on an overturned bucket and sorted everything into piles.
Nicole called at noon.
“Did you get fired?”
“Good morning to you too.”
“It’s noon.”
“I’m reorganizing.”
“Oh, no.”
“What?”
“You only reorganize when you’re miserable.”
“I reorganize all the time.”
“You own four screwdrivers that are exactly the same because you never organize anything.”
Daniel looked at the workbench.
There were actually five.
“I’m on leave.”
“I saw the video.”
Daniel closed his eyes.
Someone had recorded part of the rescue from inside the terminal.
The clip had spread online before sunrise. It showed Scout running through the rain, Daniel tackling Marcus against the van, Laura opening the cargo hatch, and Caleb appearing in the darkness.
News stations replayed it.
Strangers called Daniel a hero.
Strangers called the terminal negligent.
Strangers argued about whether Scout had been “trained to attack,” which offended Daniel more than the accusations against him.
Scout had not attacked anybody.
Scout had made a decision.
May you like
Nicole said, “You looked terrified.”
“I wasn’t.”
